Fruit oven by Renzo Piano

Minister Austin Gatt's recent declaration on the possible uses for the lower level of the new Parliament building has reminded me of two vignettes, one recounted by the late folklorist Ġużé Cassar Pullicino (1921-2005), the other by anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain.

Mr Cassar Pullicino was a health inspector just after WWII, an experience about which he spoke to me with a twinkle in his gentle bookworm's eyes.

One of his duties was to visit private houses to ensure compliance with health regulations, such as the one stipulating that all homes had to have a toilet bowl installed. In rural areas, the rule was observed to the letter. The toilet bowl was installed but the dwellers, who often had fields to till, were reluctant to let human waste go to, well, waste: there was a perfectly good use for it as fertiliser. However, they were also reluctant to let the shining, ceramic toilet bowl go unused.

It became interior decoration: an extravagant flower-pot.

A variation on the theme of a startling, amusing use of space also comes up in a memoir by Prof. Boissevain, recounting his early years of fieldwork in a 1960s Maltese village. It seems some of the first houses to sport a modern oven wanted to draw attention to it even when it was not in use for baking or roasting. So it became, particularly on special occasions, a kind of tabernacle for bowls of colourful fruit.

In both cases, the earnest intention and the decorative touch were there but the use was worse than inappropriate. It was - according to the established canons of home decoration, anyway - inept. The domestic pride signalled not progressive refinement but rather how much the household's emulation lagged behind the socially unforgiving standards.

Alas, similar signals are being sent out by the government's statements about one option being canvassed for the lower level of Parliament.

Explaining why there was no space even for an electronic library, in the present design, Dr Gatt said one of the options being considered was a museum of Maltese history and political development - an interactive experience that would enable the public "to walk through its national identity". Someone needs to walk the minister through the notion of national identity.

It is not coterminous with a nation's political development. It is not the nation's CV. Nor is it best explored by a kind of advanced-level Malta Experience. Indeed, the latter might serve to project a grotesque distortion.

The challenge of representing national identity is very different from that of representing political development. The latter needs to avoid falling into pseudo-history and to find a way in which to present events with hotly-contested interpretations. These challenges can be professionally resolved and a state-of-the-art museum is an appropriate communicative form.

(Whether it would attract many visitors or is the best use for a prime site is a different issue.)

National identity is something else. It is not a fantasy but national fantasies about "who we are" do form part of it. One should not overdo the similarity between national and personal identity but some parallels are worth underlining: Both, properly understood, involve inner conflicts and demons; schizoid pressures as much as integrity; failures and remorse as much as "pride"; dirty deeds, about which silence must be kept, as much as achievement to be glowingly narrated.

Which is why the greatest insights into Maltese national identity are not the monopoly of historians (although their work is vital). The arts are essential. In literature alone, writers like Oliver Friggieri and Frans Sammut have captured something important about identity experienced as claustrophobia; poets like J.J. Cremona about identity under siege; dramatists like Erin Serracino-Inglott about identity as a Faustian pact with the devil, in which mediocrity is deliberately chosen for peace of mind; while Alfred Sant has explored schizoid pressures in more than one literary form.

The power of these works is that they enable the clarification of everyday experience, magnetising its details in a new way so that, out of art, a kind of truth emerges. But tear that truth out of its performative cathartic context and stick it into an interactive museum and you will see it shrivel into banality if not untruth.

An interactive museum about national identity runs a high risk of being the equivalent of the histrionic sermon by a child during Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. No, make that a Buġibba of culture. Or a high-tech oven with a proud bowl of fruit in it.

But it might even do worse. A museum about identity would be hard pressed not to use the language developed for museums of "ethnic identity" elsewhere. But those are identities that are really archaeological artefacts, cut off from the real springs of life of the people they supposedly refer to.

Such a language adopted for Malta would transform a living, dynamic national identity into a pious essence. Many Maltese would feel cut off from it - admitting to feeling "not really Maltese" - as they do now from the empty nationalist pieties that have been uttered since the 19th century's invention of "il-Malti safi" (pure Maltese). Others would use this artificial essence for their chauvinist, xenophobic ends.

The government seriously needs to reconsider its options for the site. In keeping its cards close to its chest for the Piano project, it has held its usual cultural consultants at arm's length. It needs to draw them closer again.

ranierfsadni@europe.com